Institutional clients are vital for the crypto space, and their power can bring crypto mass adoption closer.

Coinbase outages, explained

Jesse Pollak is the head of engineering for consumer products at Coinbase.

He just revealed what cause the two massive outages that managed to paralyze the leading crypto exchange during moments of peak trading volume and price action.

In a new blog post that’s been recently published, Pollak said that the first incident that took place on April 29 was initially caused by an increase in the rate of the new connections that were hitting the primary databases.

“When this spike in connections occurred, the host operating system for the database began rejecting new TCP connections to the host, which triggered degraded operations and restarts in the routing layer for the database,” he said.

He continued and explained that the first attempts to mitigate this situation were not successful, and users had some trouble accessing Coinbase during two separate periods throughout the day.

The second outage took place on May 9th when the was really high market volatility. He said that this was linked to increased latency across outgoing HTTP requests that triggered DNS queries.

Coinbase is rolling out improvements

Pollak also made sure to highlight that the crypto exchange is working hard to roll out improvements to prevent similar incidents in the future.

“Both of these incidents impacted our ability to serve Coinbase customers at critical moments. One of our company values is continuous learning and we are committed to taking the learnings from these episodes to improve Coinbase,” he said.